Volunteers are often guardian-case angels

Looking for an unpaid challenge? The Spokane County court administrator’s office may have a job for you.

No, it’s not jury duty.

It’s a chance to help monitor about 2,000 cases in which guardians are appointed to handle the financial and personal affairs of people who for a variety of reasons are unable to look out for themselves.

Courts create guardianships for children who receive insurance settlements, elderly people, or people of any age who are mentally incapacitated. Some get state-certified professional guardians, but many are placed in the care of relatives.

To make sure court-appointed guardians are doing their jobs, the county uses volunteers to comb files looking for irregularities.

Sometimes guardians aren’t aware of all the rules they must follow and reports they must file. Sometimes they move and lose touch with the courts that appointed them. And sometimes they get sticky fingers.

That’s why, for the past five years, the county has used three categories of volunteers to monitor the guardians: file researchers, court visitors and volunteer auditors.

Volunteers scrutinize financial records, visit homes to check the welfare of people who need guardians, and pore over old case files to bring them up to date or close them. In effect, they are auditors, social workers and detectives.

“It’s a nice program for volunteers because it has different niches for people’s interests,” said Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor. “There’s a niche for all kinds of folks.”

O’Connor helped implement the guardianship monitoring program as head of the Spokane County Superior Court judges’ guardianship committee, but she credits Superior Court Commissioner Fred Aronow with the idea.

Spokane’s program – developed with help from the AARP – is probably the largest in the state, according to O’Connor. Only a handful of counties have programs, but they include populous King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

O’Connor believes the key to making the guardianship monitoring program work was county commissioners’ decision to assign the equivalent of two full-time employees to support the volunteers and follow up on the information they provide.

However, Spokane County’s 50 or so original volunteers have dwindled to about a dozen and court officials would like to double that number.

Three half-day training sessions for recruits are scheduled Nov. 16-18.

Ing Montgomery is one of the original volunteers. Officially, the retired city of Spokane building inspection supervisor is a “file researcher.” Unofficially, he’s a surefire bloodhound.

Last week, Montgomery was on the trail of a woman who had disappeared since a guardian was appointed for her 20 years ago. Foul play was not suspected. More likely, given her medical problems, she moved away and died naturally – but a judge can’t close the case until the facts are known.

Montgomery uses a variety of databases and a telephone to pursue clues he finds in court files and other county records. Playing his hunches, he calls small-town clerks, apartment managers, nursing home administrators, even people who served as witnesses for a wedding license.

Working one day a week, in between other cases, he sleuthed from March through September to find a 10-year-old girl now a 30-year-old woman in Kalispell, Mont. The woman’s name had changed three times, and she’d had two guardians when Montgomery found her.

“It’s kind of fun when you finally find it out,” Montgomery said.

Montgomery said he and other volunteers take satisfaction from helping care for people who need a hand.

Court visitors get a chance to help in person, visiting homes to make sure that the needs of people in guardianships are being met adequately. No major problems have been found, but the visitors have sometimes recommended different living arrangements, according to Assistant Court Administrator Diane Robertson, who oversees the guardianship monitoring program.

In a couple of cases, Robertson said, court visitors have discovered that people were no longer incapacitated, allowing courts to restore the individual’s right to make their own decisions.

There are no prerequisite qualifications for court visitors except that they must pass a background check and have good communication skills. Current visitors include a retired nurse, a retired teacher, a business owner, a law student, a homemaker and a retired school reading resource specialist.

Guardianship auditors needn’t be accountants, but they must have some financial background that allows them to review bank records and find problems. One of the current auditors has a background in banking; another, in insurance.

Volunteer auditors have prevented the loss of tens of thousands of dollars. In one case, an auditor discovered $175,000 missing from a child’s trust fund.

“We probably would never have found it had we not had the guardianship monitoring program,” Robertson said.

Tipped off by the volunteer auditor, county officials appointed a legal representative for the child. The representative filed a lawsuit against the child’s guardian and the law firm that set up the trust account. The law firm improperly failed to require a bond to protect the trust fund and a blocked bank account that would have forced the guardian – the child’s mother – to get a court order to take money out of the account.

The law firm agreed in March this year to pay a $125,000 settlement.

Two months later, in another misappropriation detected by a volunteer auditor, a man finished repaying $55,500 he was supposed to have been keeping for his incapacitated mother.